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Topic: BlizzCon 2018 (Read 350 times)

Not a lot of Blizz fans here, but I'm tossing in any announcements from the Con here.*In co-operation with Kellogg's, Blizz is making "Lucio-ohs Cereal"*On the Battlenet launcher? You can claim Destiny 2 for free until Nov 18th*New Hearthstone expansion in December*New original Heroes of the Storm hero. Not one from any other Blizz game*New Overwatch short and hero, Ashe, an outlaw former compatriot of McCree*Wow Classic- Summer 2019*Six Lego Overwatch sets enroute*Warcraft 3 Reforged in 2019*Diablo: Immortals, which is set between Diablo 2 and 3. Apparently it's also a mobile game

OK. Was it being built up as a "new Diablo game" and turned out to be a bait and switch or was it that any Diablo announcement was a surprise and the fact that it's such a disappoint one had fans up in arms?

*From the way Blizzard arranges BlizzCon, folks knew something Diablo related was on the way. Blizz will have the opening segment and then the first Q&A will be related to the big thing just revealed. If they announce a WoW expansion, the first Q&A will be for WoW. And this one had Diablo immediately following the opening, so folks knew something was up. They suspected an announcement for something. Maybe Diablo 4, but Blizz almost immediately put the kibosh on that one, but maybe for an expansion for D3, or a new hero class or a Diablo 2 remaster or maybe crossplay between the console versions and the PC. A phone game was not on anyone's watch list.

*The folks who are at Blizzcon are basically 99% PC gamers. A few folks primarily play Hearthstone on mobile devices and some folks play Overwatch on consoles, but by far, they're PC gamers. If Blizz had spent that Q&A hour talking about, say, the new Switch version of Diablo, folks would have likely rolled their eyes and been annoyed that they were talking consoles instead of for PC. But I don't think that they would have been as angry as they were for this. And the impression they got was that the folks who should be working on more Diablo PC stuff were working instead on the mobile game.

*PC ports to mobile are generally not good. You can play Fortnight, for example, on your tablet, but no one is doing so competitively. Heck, I can run rings around folks playing on a tablet and I suck at the game. The controls for a tablet just are not good. And, having played a number of other ARPGs on tablets and phones, the don't play very well at all. Maybe Blizz will surprise everyone, but it's doubtful. There's only so much you can do with touch controls.

*Finally, Blizz handled it very, very badly. If they had announced this somewhere else, the fans would have griped but not to this degree. But to make this a showpiece for a con where your most devoted fans are spending 2 grand to attend? It's "Welcome to Disneyland! All our rides are closed except for the teacups and Small World." When your fans are asking in the Q&A if the announcement was a very late April Fool's joke (and Blizzard's 2014 April Fools joke was that they were making a mobile version of Diablo), then you've screwed up in reading the fan base. And when a panelist asks the disgruntled fans in the audience "Well, you've all got phones don't you?" Yeah, that's an almost textbook example of "That question will make things worse."

There may also be a bit of "Let's announce something that seems geared for the Chinese market's very different tastes at a Western convention" involved as well, not to mention the "okay, how are you going to make money with this?" question involved with mobile gaming. And a reminder- Diablo 3's release had an auction house where you could buy in-game items with real money that was so despised by Western fans that it got removed in the first patch. So the fans are already a bit touchy on the monetization front.